5 Easy Ways to Increase the Battery Life of Your Samsung Galaxy Watch

There are different levels of wearable technology. You can’t bring your home computer with you to a coffee shop, but you can definitely bring a laptop. You wouldn’t pull out your laptop just to check email on the street, but a phone does that job well. Even digging in your pocket to retrieve your phone just to check a notification or skip a song can be a chore, which is why many people opt for smartwatches.

Smartwatches also have a number of benefits that your phone can’t give you. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch, for example, can measure your heart rate, calories burned, blood pressure and even stress levels. However, any smartwatch can only do this if the battery allows it, which is why a battery that doesn’t last long enough is one of the reasons why users abandon smartwatches.

One of the best features of Wear OS 7 is longer battery life for all smartwatches running the update, but it won’t reach all devices for a while. Until then, there are still a few steps you can take to increase your Samsung Galaxy Watch’s battery life from just one day to three. This includes turning off features you don’t need, updating your apps and system, and some general tips and tricks to extend the battery life of your smartwatch.

One of the biggest benefits of having a good smartwatch on your wrist is health tracking. Being able to monitor factors like your heart rate, blood pressure, calories burned, and other useful stats on the go makes healthy living much easier.

As useful as tracking your smartwatch’s health is, it’s also one of the reasons your Galaxy Watch’s battery may drain faster. Your Samsung Galaxy smartwatch is set to measure certain health-related data continuously or every 10 minutes by default. Since a process running this often will consume battery power, you can change how often your watch’s sensors activate to extend battery life.

You can change the behavior of these trackers by scrolling down and opening Settings on your Galaxy Watch, go to Healththen selecting the specific tracker you want to edit. The heart rate and stress sensors are set to update every 10 minutes while idle, and you can turn either off so they only work when you manually ask them to. This only changes how the heart rate sensors work when you’re standing still; your Galaxy Watch will always measure your heart rate continuously when you exercise. You can also go to Settings > Health > Stress > Sleep and turn off nighttime sensors like blood oxygen and body temperature to save even more battery while you sleep.

As with any device, the main culprit for a quickly draining battery is often your screen usage. Your smartwatch screen doesn’t consume as much battery as a phone screen, but because it’s always on and showing the time even when you’re not actively using it, it can reduce your battery life.

You can reduce your display’s battery consumption by turning off the always-on display feature. This prevents your smartwatch from showing the time when not in use, meaning it is only active when you wake the screen by tilting your wrist or tapping the screen. There is a toggle switch for this feature under Settings > Display > Always on display. You can also swipe down and tap the watch icon in the quick panel to do the same thing.

If you don’t want to get rid of the always-on display feature completely, you have the option to put your smartwatch into sleep mode when you’re not using it. To do this, place your palm on your smartwatch screen until it darkens. You can also reduce the screen brightness to improve the battery life of your Galaxy Watch by going to Settings > Displaythen changing the brightness from there.

Android smartwatches are great on their own, but they really shine through their integration into the Android ecosystem. You can see your watch data on your phone, see live update notifications on your smartwatch with Wear OS 7, and essentially make your Galaxy Watch work as an extension of your phone with syncing.

All that syncing affects your battery, and you may not want or even need real-time syncing for everything. One way to immediately increase your battery life is to turn off frequent syncing in the Samsung Health app. This means you won’t get real-time health updates, but it’s a worthwhile sacrifice for most people who won’t need to see an updated step count on their phone every few minutes.

In the Samsung Health app, go to Measuresthen tap the three dots to open a drop-down menu. From there, tap Frequent synchronization and turn it off. Users have reported that sometimes the option is not displayed. To fix this issue, simply uninstall and reinstall the Samsung Health app from the Play Store.

Updates are intended to better optimize battery life, and using an older version – whether for your system’s operating system or for a single app – means you miss out on these optimizations. Likewise, developers optimize their applications according to the latest system requirements. An application optimized for a recent update may not perform as well on an older version of the operating system. As such, making sure everything on your Galaxy Watch is the latest version can improve your battery life.

To update the system software of your Galaxy Watch, you can tap the Settings icon and scroll down to Software update. This requires an active internet connection and a paired Android phone. You can also use the Galaxy Wearable app to update your smartwatch from your phone. Go to SettingsSO Watch software updateand press Install.

For third-party apps, you can update them manually from the Google Play Store app the same way you would on a phone. You can also enable automatic updates by scrolling down to Settings in the Google Play Store smartwatch app and turning on the Auto-update apps to change. To update native Samsung apps, you can go to Settings on your watch, scroll to Applicationsthen press Samsung app updates. From here you can update each app individually or tap Update all to update them all.

There are many settings you can change to improve your Galaxy Watch’s battery over a longer period of time, but sometimes you end up with a watch that’s about to die in a few hours and you need an instant boost. Manually activating each option might not be quick, and even then the gains might not be enough. In such a situation, you can rely on the power saving feature of the Galaxy Watch.

Enabling your Galaxy Watch’s power saving mode immediately turns off several features we mentioned earlier, such as the always-on display, and limits battery-intensive processes like background network usage and app activity. It also limits processor speed and syncing between devices, turns off Wi-Fi, and disables system updates. You can enable power saving on your Galaxy Watch by going to SettingsSO Batterythen turning on the Energy saving to change.